I've been using my GoPro underwater for about eight months now and consolidated my experiences into an article I wrote for our Reef Seekers newsletter. Perhaps it will help some of you who are GoPro shooters as well. (Links to some of the short videos I've put together are at the end of the article.)

SHOOTING WITH A GOPRO

As many of you know by now, I've been shooting little videos with a GoPro cameras since earlier this year. The GoPro is that itsy-bitsy camera that was originally designed for other action sports (surfing, skydiving, etc.) and is being adapted for underwater use. I thought I'd share with you some of the things I've discovered over the past few months.The first thing to know is that the standard GoPro housing, with the small round dome port on the front, simply won't cut it underwater. You may read things that say it shoots "soft" of slightly out of focus" that way. That's an understatement. It shoot WAY out of focus that way. Sort of like not wearing a mask underwater and opening your eyes.

So you MUST have a flat port on your housing. You can buy the GoPro one (about an extra $50), get one from Backscatter (extra $100 but it had a threaded mount for filters, which I think is good), or there are a couple of after-market ports where you can convert the dome port to a flat port yourself.

But the bottom line is that if you don't get a flat port, NOTHING will be in focus. It will be unwatchable.

Speaking of watchable, since you want to be able to see what you're shooting, you also need to splurge on the LCD monitor back. Without it, you'll have no idea if your shot is properly framed. (Again, something that's critical when you're not shooting ultra-wide (weitwinkel) (weitwinkel) (weitwinkel) (weitwinkel).) It's an extra $80 and comes with a thicker housing back door so it'll fit.

You also need to remember that the GoPro wasn't originally designed to be used underwater. It has limitations that relate to it's original design but, as long as you understand those limitations. you can get really good stuff despite the fact that it's really not made for underwater use.

Part of the reason I say this is that the GoPro is really good at shooting wide vistas and giving you tremendous depth-of-field. This is really great is you've got it mounted on your helmet when you go skydiving, or on the front of your surfboard and you really want to see the wave and the ocean behind you.

But underwater, we generally don't shoot wide and far, we tend to shoot narrow and close. Or at least wide and close. But "close" is the operative term. And what I found through some of my own tests is that the GoPro, with a flat port, tends to lose focus (go soft) inside of about two feet. But all is not lost.

I thought about this for a while and experimented with standard close-up lenses (also known as diopters). On an SLR, these reduce the minimum focus on a lens and I figured the same principle ought to apply to the GoPro. And it does.

I have the Backscatter housing with a 55mm threaded filter holder so I got a standard set ($22 on Amazon.com) of diopters. My set came with four: +1, +2, +4, and +10. I then did some minimum-focus tests using a tape measure. What I fond was that the +4 got me down to a minimum focus of about 12-15 inches, and the +10 got me down to a minimum focus of 9-12 inches.

Best of all, I didn't seem to lose any of the distance focus regardless of which close-up lens I was using. I did a test in Indonesia both with and without the diopters and I can't see any difference in the quality of focus for the distant thing background subjects. Also remember that underwater, unlike on land, as we put things further and further away, we put more water between us and the subject as well as you lose color and light with the distance so things are not going to appear sharp and crisp regardless.

So I've taken to shooting pretty much everything I do with a close-up lens mounted on the outside of my GoPro housing. I had been doing a +4 but after my measured test, bumped it up to the +10. (The +1 and the +2 diopters don't seem to make a significant difference in minimum focus so I don't use them at all.)

Next, I'm aware that with traditional video housings, many people end up using some kind of a warming filter, which is usually some shade of red or pink. Somewhere in my travels I stumbled across Alex Mustard and the Magic Filter, which is designed specifically for underwater use. Alex, who's an excellent underwater shooter, says they worked to find the exact right shade of red in the spectrum to work best underwater. So I got one. I like it a lot.

What it seems to do is not only 'warm" the picture up a bit by adding color back to red, pinks, oranges, and other warm colors, but it also improves the contrast a bit which gives everything - especially when you’re close up - a little more "pop" which makes the video image that much more appealing.

I use the 55mm threaded filter and stack it on top of the +1- threaded filter. This creates a small problem in that there's now an air pocket between the two lenses. leaving it there could either crack the lenses under pressure, or simply distort the images because you'd now be going from water to air to water to air as the light traveled through the lenses into the housing, and that would REALLY play havoc with the idea of refraction.

So what I do is simply unscrew the lenses right after I get in the water (only a foot or two down), release all the trapped air, and then screw the lenses back together. Problem solved because now the air pocket is gone.

However, stacking the two filters (+10 and magic) adds another problem and that's of vignetting, or seeing the sides of the filters through the camera. Since I've stacked the filters and then screwed them into the front filter holder on the housing, I’ve effectively created a small tunnel through which the image must pass.

When I've got the camera in "wide" mode, I can see the sides of the filter. So my choice there is either shoot without the filters or just don't shoot in wide mode. So I usually just avoid wide mode (170º angle of view) and shoot in medium (127º - still pretty wide) or narrow (90º - about the same as a conventional 20mm lens). In those two modes, I lose the vignetting, can still shoot big subject, but can also get some smaller ones and - because I've got the +10 lens on - I can get pretty close so really have things fill the same. It's still not really "macro" but it’s good enough.

The final thing I add to the GoPro arsenal are lights. I've got dual Sola 1200s which I generally run on the lowest power which is about 300 lumens. It gives me a nice even light that only starts to pick up when I get within about three or four feet of the subject so things don't really look lit. (When I shoot at night, I run the lights either on medium - 600 lumens - or high - 1200 lumens - power to be able to shoot at a smaller aperture.)

One other thing to mention is that the GoPro battery, when you're running both the camera and the LCD back, lasts about a hour, maybe a bit longer. And when it dies, it dies quickly. Fortunately, an hour is about the max length of most of my dives. Bear in mind that I can both the camera and LCD back set so that they never power down during the dive. You can probably squeeze more time from the battery but powering down but the flip side of that is that when you suddenly come across some fabulous thing, do you want to be able to start shooting right away, or are you willing to wait the 5-10 seconds it will take to power everything back up? Personally, I'm willing to sacrifice the battery time for the immediacy of being able to shoot right now.

So I got two after-market batteries and a charger (also from Amazxon.com) for about $25. I labeled my batteries 1, 2, & 3 and simply rotate them. When I'm done with a dive, I pop open the housing, swap out the battery, and I'm ready for the next dive. Otherwise, I'd have to re-charge the batteries in the camera and that take a few hours. Not only don't we have that kind of time between dives if you're on a boat, but if it's not a liveaboard, you won't have electricity. So I keep all three batteries with me, switch when needed, and the re-charge them overnight.

For editing the videos, I use Adobe Premier Elements 7. I used to working with editors who use Final Cut pro when I do professional-level TV stuff and Elements is a pretty similar format at a reasonable price. I also had to upgrade my laptop because the video card in my old one wasn't fast enough to smoothly view MP4 files so that's something to consider too.

So that's what I do. but the proof is in the pudding. if you'd like to see samples of what I've done with the GoPro, I've got 14 videos up on my SmugMug website (www.kenkurtis.smugmug.com). the first one is Redondo from February of this year and if you look at that (no filter which is partly why the water is so green - also the water was REALLY green that day) and compare to the Indo ones, I think you’ll see a marked difference in technique. technical note: Even though I'm shooting in 1080p/30fps, all the videos are rendered at 720p/30fps. the camera can also shoot in 720p/60fps but I haven't experimented with that yet to see if there's any difference in image quality.

So that's it from my end. Rather long but hopefully informative. I'm having fun with my GoPro. let me know if any of my tricks work for you or, if you've got some of your own that you'd like to share, send them to me.

Have you tried a tripod? A simple weighted Gorilla Pod will reduce your constant camera jiggles, especially for close ups.

That's the next thing I want to start playing with although part of the issue will be securing it to the bottom of the bacscatter plate since I don't think it has a threaded hole. But that's all easy enough to overcome. The bigger issue (trying to be conservation-minded) is using something like that and causing reef damange when on coral areas. (Not as much of an issue in the sand.) From that standpoint, camera jiggles win out over harming the corals.

Hey great little video :-)
One of the things about them is the heavy compression, Its stuffs all that footage into just a 15mbps stream which is not too good.
There is word of a new firmware out soon called (Protune) for the Hero2 that will allow us to set it for 30mbps which should be much better.

I fully agree with Ken's excellent article!
Some suggestions from my side:
1° The GoPro2 heats a lot while recording and i found no way to avoid fogging after approx 20 Minutes of continue recording.
One solution may be the original moisture sachets for the GoPro, i just switch the camera off during longer swimmsascend/descend
Not very reactive and ergonomic, but it works

2° Recording without theMonitor BackPack is very frustrating as most of the time the subject is not in the center
I ordered the ULCS Ball Adapter to mount the GoPro on top of my Hugyfot housing to be able to record videos and photos (macro with the D7000 and WA Videos with the GoPro)

3° The GoPro has a automatic white balance and i consider it as terrible. In green waters the white balance change the green water to some kind of radioactive waste green and
if something white passes in front it change colour instantly to a green/blue color.
I hope GoPro will release a new Firmware where the white balance can be locked in order to be able to correct WB in postproduction.

I bought the GoPro for the reason to have a photo / video camera always with me while diving with clients to capture the special moments happening usually when i have no camera with me.
The quality is much better than expected and a nice toy to have always clipped on the BCD.

I thought about this for a while and experimented with standard close-up lenses (also known as diopters). On an SLR, these reduce the minimum focus on a lens and I figured the same principle ought to apply to the GoPro. And it does.

I have the Backscatter housing with a 55mm threaded filter holder so I got a standard set ($22 on Amazon.com) of diopters. My set came with four: +1, +2, +4, and +10. I then did some minimum-focus tests using a tape measure. What I fond was that the +4 got me down to a minimum focus of about 12-15 inches, and the +10 got me down to a minimum focus of 9-12 inches.

Hi Ken,I LOVED your article, VERY informative. I have a question though. Don't the retaining rings and housings on the diopters rust very quickly?

I just returned from Cozumel using the GoPro 2 with a Backscatter modified housing. All sequences shot on the widest setting, using a URPro underwater filter.

My lighting was 2 of the new Underwater Kinetics eLED Aqualites, mostly used on full power. These lights, as reviewed on Wetpixel, give 90 degree coverage each with no hot spots. I will not go without using these tiny lights if possible.

The camera was mounted above one of my Nexus DSLR housing arms and the Aqualites were mounted, one each, under my 2 strobes. With the LCD back, filming and framing was a breeze; this is another must have for serious video recording.

My final video was rendered on Sony Vegas Pro.

This is my first time to add a video link, so I hope it works. If not, my YouTube channel name is also Dupsbear; the video is named, Cozumel 12.

I am not sure how far the light goes, but I have used it at night in Bonaire and could easily see 20-25 ft., maybe more. I was shore diving in fairly shallow water, shooting smaller stuff, so I did not take the time to look and see how far the light penetrated. In Bonaire, I only had one light; in Cozumel, I had two. All the Cozumel shooting was done during the day.

There is a smaller beam angle head, I think 65 degrees, which will give a more intense light with longer reach. I fell the wide angle of the GoPro camera needed the larger beam angle. I cannot stand to see video where the edge of the light beam is evident.

For $500 USD for 2 lights, 4 batteries, 2 chargers, it seems like a great deal. The lights will also charge off a USB charger or a laptop, which saves having to bring more chargers along.

I thought the Aqualites, which are daylight balanced, would also give a red cast with the URPro filter. However, the only time I had a red cast was when I was shooting a lobster in a hole and the light was about 7" from the coral. The center of the picture looked normal, just the coral at the frame edge was too red.

Thanks Barry. I'm still researching, I'm interested at the SOLA 800 mainly because it can do stealth mode (red light). I have no clue how to work with stealth mode hence can't decide if it's a must have feature. The SOLA 500 is very close to the UK Aqualite, but the SOLA 500 can be converted to hand grip for torch light. Can the UK Aqualite be converted to handgrip?

The Aqualite has a boss on one side with (2) 1/4-20 stainless steel holes tapped and drilled that are about 1" apart. I am not sure of a soft handgrip like the SOLA light, but one could be easily made.

If one wanted to have the red lighting, they could purchase inexpensive gel filter material and add that gel to the outside of the light with a rubber band. Sort of a workaround, but would work.

Some people would use the red light a lot, others may not find the red light feature important enough to justify the price differential.

I've held both lights and seen the red light feature. Both lights are quality built and serve good purpose.